The Hacker Crackdown Part 16

Let's sample another vivid hacker manifesto. Here are some excerpts from "The Conscience of a Hacker," by "The Mentor,"

from Phrack Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3.

"I made a discovery today. I found a computer.

Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to.

If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up.

Not because it doesn't like me. (. . .) "And then it happened. . .a door opened to a world. . .

rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from day-to-day incompetencies is sought. . .

a board is found. 'This is it. . .this is where I belong. . .'

"I know everyone here. . .even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again. . .

I know you all. . . (. . .)

"This is our world now. . .the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore. . .and you call us criminals.

We seek after knowledge. . .and you call us criminals.

We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias. . .and you call us criminals.

You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and try to make us believe that it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

"Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.

My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for."

There have been underground boards almost as long as there have been boards. One of the first was 8BBS, which became a stronghold of the West Coast phone-phreak elite.

After going on-line in March 1980, 8BBS sponsored "Susan Thunder,"

and "Tuc," and, most notoriously, "the Condor." "The Condor"

bore the singular distinction of becoming the most vilified American phreak and hacker ever. Angry underground a.s.sociates, fed up with Condor's peevish behavior, turned him in to police, along with a heaping double-helping of outrageous hacker legendry.

As a result, Condor was kept in solitary confinement for seven months, for fear that he might start World War Three by triggering missile silos from the prison payphone. (Having served his time, Condor is now walking around loose; WWIII has thus far conspicuously failed to occur.)

The sysop of 8BBS was an ardent free-speech enthusiast who simply felt that ANY attempt to restrict the expression of his users was unconst.i.tutional and immoral.

Swarms of the technically curious entered 8BBS and emerged as phreaks and hackers, until, in 1982, a friendly 8BBS alumnus pa.s.sed the sysop a new modem which had been purchased by credit-card fraud.

Police took this opportunity to seize the entire board and remove what they considered an attractive nuisance.

Plovernet was a powerful East Coast pirate board that operated in both New York and Florida.

Owned and operated by teenage hacker "Quasi Moto,"

Plovernet attracted five hundred eager users in 1983.

"Emmanuel Goldstein" was one-time co-sysop of Plovernet, along with "Lex Luthor," founder of the "Legion of Doom" group.

Plovernet bore the signal honor of being the original home of the "Legion of Doom," about which the reader will be hearing a great deal, soon.

"Pirate-80," or "P-80," run by a sysop known as "Scan-Man,"

got into the game very early in Charleston, and continued steadily for years. P-80 flourished so flagrantly that even its most hardened users became nervous, and some slanderously speculated that "Scan Man" must have ties to corporate security, a charge he vigorously denied.

"414 Private" was the home board for the first GROUP to attract conspicuous trouble, the teenage "414 Gang,"

whose intrusions into Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Los Alamos military computers were to be a nine-days-wonder in 1982.

At about this time, the first software piracy boards began to open up, trading cracked games for the Atari 800 and the Commodore C64. Naturally these boards were heavily frequented by teenagers. And with the 1983 release of the hacker-thriller movie War Games, the scene exploded. It seemed that every kid in America had demanded and gotten a modem for Christmas.

Most of these dabbler wannabes put their modems in the attic after a few weeks, and most of the remainder minded their P's and Q's and stayed well out of hot water. But some stubborn and talented diehards had this hacker kid in War Games figured for a happening dude. They simply could not rest until they had contacted the underground-- or, failing that, created their own.

In the mid-80s, underground boards sprang up like digital fungi.

ShadowSp.a.w.n Elite. Sherwood Forest I, II, and III.

Digital Logic Data Service in Florida, sysoped by no less a man than "Digital Logic" himself; Lex Luthor of the Legion of Doom was prominent on this board, since it was in his area code. Lex's own board, "Legion of Doom,"

started in 1984. The Neon Knights ran a network of Apple- hacker boards: Neon Knights North, South, East and West.

Free World II was run by "Major Havoc." Lunatic Labs is still in operation as of this writing. Dr. Ripco in Chicago, an anything-goes anarchist board with an extensive and raucous history, was seized by Secret Service agents in 1990 on Sundevil day, but up again almost immediately, with new machines and scarcely diminished vigor.

The St. Louis scene was not to rank with major centers of American hacking such as New York and L.A. But St.

Louis did rejoice in possession of "Knight Lightning"

and "Taran King," two of the foremost JOURNALISTS native to the underground. Missouri boards like Metal Shop, Metal Shop Private, Metal Shop Brewery, may not have been the heaviest boards around in terms of illicit expertise. But they became boards where hackers could exchange social gossip and try to figure out what the heck was going on nationally--and internationally.

Gossip from Metal Shop was put into the form of news files, then a.s.sembled into a general electronic publication, Phrack, a portmanteau t.i.tle coined from "phreak" and "hack."

The Phrack editors were as obsessively curious about other hackers as hackers were about machines.

Phrack, being free of charge and lively reading, began to circulate throughout the underground. As Taran King and Knight Lightning left high school for college, Phrack began to appear on mainframe machines linked to BITNET, and, through BITNET to the "Internet," that loose but extremely potent not-for-profit network where academic, governmental and corporate machines trade data through the UNIX TCP/IP protocol. (The "Internet Worm" of November 2-3,1988, created by Cornell grad student Robert Morris, was to be the largest and best-publicized computer-intrusion scandal to date. Morris claimed that his ingenious "worm" program was meant to harmlessly explore the Internet, but due to bad programming, the Worm replicated out of control and crashed some six thousand Internet computers. Smaller-scale and less ambitious Internet hacking was a standard for the underground elite.)

Most any underground board not hopelessly lame and out-of-it would feature a complete run of Phrack--and, possibly, the lesser-known standards of the underground: the Legion of Doom Technical Journal, the obscene and raucous Cult of the Dead Cow files, P/HUN magazine, Pirate, the Syndicate Reports, and perhaps the highly anarcho-political Activist Times Incorporated.

Possession of Phrack on one's board was prima facie evidence of a bad att.i.tude. Phrack was seemingly everywhere, aiding, abetting, and spreading the underground ethos.

And this did not escape the attention of corporate security or the police.

We now come to the touchy subject of police and boards.

Police, do, in fact, own boards. In 1989, there were police-sponsored boards in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia: boards such as "Crime Bytes," "Crimestoppers," "All Points"

and "Bullet-N-Board." Police officers, as private computer enthusiasts, ran their own boards in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri, Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas.

Police boards have often proved helpful in community relations.

Sometimes crimes are reported on police boards.

Sometimes crimes are COMMITTED on police boards.

This has sometimes happened by accident, as naive hackers blunder onto police boards and blithely begin offering telephone codes.

Far more often, however, it occurs through the now almost-traditional use of "sting boards." The first police sting-boards were established in 1985: "Underground Tunnel" in Austin, Texas, whose sysop Sgt. Robert Ansley called himself "Pluto"--"The Phone Company"

in Phoenix, Arizona, run by Ken MacLeod of the Maricopa County Sheriff's office--and Sgt. Dan Pasquale's board in Fremont, California.

Sysops posed as hackers, and swiftly garnered coteries of ardent users, who posted codes and loaded pirate software with abandon, and came to a sticky end.

Sting boards, like other boards, are cheap to operate, very cheap by the standards of undercover police operations.

Once accepted by the local underground, sysops will likely be invited into other pirate boards, where they can compile more dossiers.

And when the sting is announced and the worst offenders arrested, the publicity is generally gratifying. The resultant paranoia in the underground--perhaps more justly described as a "deterrence effect"-- tends to quell local lawbreaking for quite a while.

Obviously police do not have to beat the underbrush for hackers.

On the contrary, they can go trolling for them. Those caught can be grilled. Some become useful informants. They can lead the way to pirate boards all across the country.

And boards all across the country showed the sticky fingerprints of Phrack, and of that loudest and most flagrant of all underground groups, the "Legion of Doom."

The term "Legion of Doom" came from comic books. The Legion of Doom, a conspiracy of costumed super- villains headed by the chrome-domed criminal ultra- mastermind Lex Luthor, gave Superman a lot of four-color graphic trouble for a number of decades. Of course, Superman, that exemplar of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, always won in the long run. This didn't matter to the hacker Doomsters-- "Legion of Doom" was not some thunderous and evil Satanic reference, it was not meant to be taken seriously. "Legion of Doom" came from funny-books and was supposed to be funny.

"Legion of Doom" did have a good mouthfilling ring to it, though.

It sounded really cool. Other groups, such as the "Farmers of Doom,"

closely allied to LoD, recognized this grandiloquent quality, and made fun of it. There was even a hacker group called "Justice League of America," named after Superman's club of true-blue crimefighting superheros.

But they didn't last; the Legion did.

The original Legion of Doom, hanging out on Quasi Moto's Plovernet board, were phone phreaks. They weren't much into computers. "Lex Luthor" himself (who was under eighteen when he formed the Legion) was a COSMOS expert, COSMOS being the "Central System for Mainframe Operations,"

a telco internal computer network. Lex would eventually become quite a dab hand at breaking into IBM mainframes, but although everyone liked Lex and admired his att.i.tude, he was not considered a truly accomplished computer intruder. Nor was he the "mastermind"

of the Legion of Doom--LoD were never big on formal leadership.

As a regular on Plovernet and sysop of his "Legion of Doom BBS,"

Lex was the Legion's cheerleader and recruiting officer.